They did things differently there: how Brexiteers appealed to voters’ nostalgia

Ros Taylor

July 13th, 2016

They did things differently there: how Brexiteers appealed to voters’ nostalgia

Most referendums ask voters whether they want to join a political project. Britain’s EU referendum did the opposite. Elliott Green argues the campaigning was suffused by appeals to nostalgia and to a past in which Britain “took control”, and identifies four groups of voters to whom this message appealed.

Now the dust has settled a bit on last month’s vote, we should reflect on the deep conflicts it revealed about sort of nation the UK’s people would like it to be. One little-noted fact is that the referendum asked voters about leaving or retreating from a political project. Most referendums do the opposite. The vast majority of modern national referendums are about undertaking a new project, whether joining the EU, approving a new constitution or constitutional amendments, becoming a republic or an independent state. In these cases, the referendums invited countries to take a step forward into a new future – one in which life would be better than it had been before.

In contrast, the Brexit vote was a choice between the status quo or returning to what the UK looked like before it joined the European Community in 1973. This was a very rare example of giving voters an option to go back to the past, rather than the future, and it was explicitly sold as such by the Leave campaign. The common phrase used by Brexit supporters was “take back control” (in addition to “take control”), with an implicit appeal to the idea of returning the UK to what it looked like before it joined the EU Boris Johnson similarly talked about the UK’s “loss of sovereignty,” with the implicit idea that the UK’s sovereignty would be “regained” if voters chose to leave the EU. Nigel Farage also campaigned on the slogan that “we want our country back” – again, yet another clear call for returning to an unmentioned, halcyon past before the UK was overloaded by EU bureaucracy and European immigrants.

Far from appealing solely to a narrow group of anti-EU activists, these calls for returning to the past were directed at a variety of voters – in particular four overlapping groups of people:

1) Imperialist nostalgists. In 1973, the UK had only recently given up its Empire and still clung on to some of its smaller colonies like Belize and Hong Kong. The memory of the imperial past was quite fresh. Indeed, in the 1975 referendum to confirm Britain’s membership in the then European Economic Community, one of the major No campaigners was Enoch Powell, famous not only for his “Rivers of Blood” speech but also for his earlier ambitions to become Viceroy of India, while other No supporters argued that the UK should focus on its links with the post-imperial Commonwealth, rather than Europe. This nostalgia is still present today among the Brexit supporters, and it is not specific to the UK: the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party, for instance, has arguably drawn upon imperial nostalgia, as have Marine Le Pen and the Front National in France.

2) Racists. A huge amount of ink has already been spilt on how anti-immigrant racism contributed to the Leave victory, and one can easily see how invoking a Britain before mass immigration would encourage people to vote for leaving the EU. Indeed, the sharp rise in racist attacks after the referendum has included shouts of “make Britain white again,” despite the fact that leaving the EU will probably see a rise, not a fall, in non-white immigrants to the UK. Here again, there is nothing specifically British in this regard: just take a look across the Atlantic to Donald Trump, whose rise to power has been built largely on the support of white Americans with racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes, and whose major catchphrase is ‘Make America Great Again,’ not ‘Make America Great’.

3) Non-racist and non-imperialist nationalists. Scholars of nationalism such as Anthony Smith have long pointed out that nationalists commonly believe in the concept of a ‘golden age’ of the nation, such that their goal is to return their nation to its glorious past and revive it from its slumber. In many cases this ‘golden age’ is often set in the ancient past, but it need not be so distant. Indeed, for many British nationalists the golden age is World War II, when the UK resisted the Nazis and won a bloody war over great odds. Of course, World War II has long featured as a major feature in British national identity, and thus it was not surprising that references to the war featured prominently in the Leave campaign. Indeed, many Brexit supporters, including one 81-year old woman whom I met before the vote, cited Britain’s ability to ‘go it alone’ in World War II as a reason why it could survive outside the EU today, while others such as Boris Johnson compared the EU to Hitler and Napoleon.

4) Older voters. The Brexit referendum exposed a generational split in the UK. Age was one of the most important correlates of voting for Leave. What was surprising about this support for Brexit among older voters was that, in general, they tend to be risk averse as regards political change. However, in this instance they had a rare chance to vote to return to the UK of yesteryear, which in some cases certainly provoked nostalgia not only for what the UK looked like before 1973 but also what they themselves looked like. Mixing up happy memories of one’s youth with memories of society as whole is not uncommon: in one study conducted among elderly Roma in Bulgaria and Hungarians in Romania, the former group had much less attachment to the past on both a general and a personal level. Arguably, this difference lies in the fact that Romanian Hungarians can look back positively to a period when they were still part of Hungary and not an ethnic minority in another country, while the Roma have no comparable happy past to recall. This last point can also help to explain at least part of the strong support for the Remain camp in Northern Ireland and Scotland, inasmuch as the period prior to 1973 evokes the Troubles for the former and a period before devolution and the discovery of North Sea oil for the latter.

The one silver lining in this analysis is that, if another referendum were to be held again but with different wording, it is likely that the UK would vote differently. More specifically, if the question posed was not one of leaving the EU and implicitly returning the UK to what it looked like in 1973, but instead asked voters’ opinions about the specifics of the UK’s relationship with the EU going forward, then appeals to history would be much less salient. Whether or not there is a second vote on Brexit, one hopes that future referendums will be worded in such a way that encourages voters to think more about the future than the past.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the BrexitVote blog, nor the LSE.

Elliott Green is Associate Professor of Development Studies in the Department of International Development at the LSE.

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Ros Taylor

9 Comments

Part of this weak piece merely states the blindingly obvious that the referendum asked voters if they wanted to leave the EU. The supposed corollary that they were being asked to step into the past does not follow. They simply chose no longer to be part of a failing supranational organisation but to exercise self- government like most other democracies in the world. Nothing reactionary about that. Most countries choose to govern themselves. Perhaps the author has not noticed this.
If Empire was involved it was the threat of a new European empire. Brits chose decolonisation, self-government and independence. It was the progressive choice.
Most voters could not remember the British empire which was not popular with the working class anyway. Certainly Leave never mentioned it. It is simply part of the intellectual failure of the Remain side that it cannot accept that there are very good reasons to reject EU membership. Hence it projects all its anti-working class prejudice on to Leave by insisting that only racism and nostalgia and lack of education can explain the result. But over 17!million voters cannot be written off in this way.
This intellectual weakness on the part of Remain is now leading to a Stab-in-the-Back legend with the workers rather than the Jews being held responsible by people like the author who deem themselves intellectually superior. In fact the opposite is the truth and he and they are too dim to recognise it. Instead of acting like fascists and objecting to a democratic vote they should start accepting that there were very rational reasons why they lost the argument.

No. Remainers assumed imperial nostalgia was at work largely because they could not understand the true forces behind Brexit. It was a simple fall-back position. Articles in the FT –one of which I replied to– were equally ill-founded. In decades of activity in the Eurosceptic movement I have never heard anyone call for the Empire to be brought back. This is a Remaon delusion.

Alan is missing the point the leave campaign and specifically the UKIP campaign followed the line taken by Hitler in 1930s Germany- Blame the institutions then blame the foreigners for the failings in the country.
What has been ignored by both camps is the way that the working class have been first abandoned and then vilified over the last 30 years by successive Governments

This Myth of the undemocratic, totalitarian and over-bearing European institutions is the Little Englander’s version of Goebbels’ Big Lie. Blame everything on someone/something else and especially if that something is different to what you know or have experienced. How convenient to absolve yourself of the failings in your own system and poke fingers at what you are told are the “Baddies”.

The notions of national sovereignty and self-determination in this globalised and money-oriented world are so outdated and redundant that it beggars belief how anyone can still cling to them. National and even supranational governments are the hostages of forces way beyond their control and even their knowledge half the time. The simple-minded idea that ANY national government has control over anything is too puerile to be given credence.

But let us just take England’s control. How about borders? If, as seems highly likely Scotland and N.I break away into a Greater Celtic Union, England will be surrounded on all sides by borders it has no meaningful control over whatsoever. Unless of course you take the Trump approach and start building huge great walls and coastal gun emplacements. It is a nice fantasy that we can control access to English shores but the reality is that the UK as presently constituted has a sea-border of 11,000 miles and only 25 fighting ships IN TOTAL to protect it. Even assuming those ships were not already committed to other seas and duties it would require 24/7 12/12 duty rosters without breaks or refits, refuelling or resupply for each ship to patrol 400 miles of coastline. Is it just me or is there a bloody great flaw in this notion? Do you consider that sailors can stay awake 24/7? If refugees (they are NOT migrants) are willing to risk death to get to a safe place what are the REAL steps you are willing to take to stop them? Sink them before arrival perhaps?

How about protecting our airspace? The RAF currently has about 54 serviceable war-planes which are already committed to Middle East Theatres. All those Poles that are being told now to “GO HOME” are not going to enlist as their grandfathers did in order to protect our skies again. And even if they did there are no planes for them to fly.

What of safeguarding our economy and power infrastructure? Who owns our industry? Who controls our water supplies? Where DOES our electricity come from? Come on, you have all the answers it seems, tell us please just WHAT we DO control? (I already know the answers by the way).

We are having to stitch up deals with the Chinese and French to build new generating plant. I can tell you, I have bought several items in the past year, from shoes to tools with (supposedly) sharp edges all made in China and every single item has had to be returned because it broke. And THIS is who England will have building our NUCLEAR power plant? THIS is the level of control you think is appropriate for a SOVEREIGN nation?

How about our currency? Are you aware of the effect the referendum has had on our Pound? In what version of the Wizard of Oz does the B of E have the power to control international currency trading or speculation? And just how would or could a UK government control the flow of information or misinformation? We couldn’t even get our own Politicians to tell the truth.

Who makes the decisions about where and when to invest? Certainly not any UK Government of recent decades. If anything the only thing THEY have done is to DIS-INVEST in Britain. How long has the discussion over HS2 or the 3rd Runway been going on? Who has decided which factories will be built and where? Which entity has closed the steel industry and who exercises control over our manufacturing? Well, of course not OUR manufacturing, the assembly of OTHER nations goods. How’re yah gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pahree?

Fantasies of control but in the REAL world decisions are taken by the Money-Men and the Multi-national Corporations. Oh, for sure a government can PRETEND it is exercising control, it can kid its electorate that “It’s OK, I’m in charge) but the strings are being pulled far away from public scrutiny and accountability.

You argue that ceding authority to EU institutions damages our Sovereignty. So Good luck celebrating Independence Day – what are you gonna tell The World Bank, IMF, WTO, UN Security Council, WHO, International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, International Seabed Authority, NATO,
International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, United Nations General Assembly, to name just a few and to which the UK has obligations or has signed acceptances of their jurisdiction. Good luck telling Vladimir (Ras)Putin to stay out of your backyard when he comes knocking. Somehow I don’t see HIM taking much notice of your SOVEREIGNTY.

So maybe an English Sovereign Government will finally get to grips with the weather. Gonna fix the floods huh? Stop the rivers overflowing and the seas from crashing ashore? Bring back Canute, his time has come. Planning to introduce conscription to make up for all the fruit & veg pickers who have run home to safety? Yes, let us pull the blanket over our head and pretend there isn’t a REAL world out there that DOESN’T owe us a living or need us or even care if we continue to exist. Maybe you’ve heard, the Empire HAS fallen.

No, the truth is the only REAL control open to an English Government is how it will manage the decline and prevent people leaving the country. I predict that within 10 years Teresa May will have instituted
border controls to keep people IN and currency regulation to prevent the flow of Capital OUT. You will be back in that Golden Era of nostalgia when foreign holidays were the privilege of the rich and travel required permission.There’ll be no need to worry about immigration it’ll be EMIGRATION that will have to be controlled. Don’t think it will happen huh? Well, I was born when it WAS happening and if I’ve learned anything it’s that history has a habit of repeating itself.

You have done what all the Brexiters did – ignored the real-politik and cloaked your arguments in the Emperor’s Clothes. One day soon you will realise just how chilly it has got out there and start crying for Mummy to bring your Blankie.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on the history of the development of nations or their governments.

The Brexit vote has come from the same heap of hypocrisy and false ideas, shabbily manipulated by a sham parliamentary system, which opposes HS2, denies climate change and denigrates green policies, supports grammar schools, is complacent with child poverty, regional inequality, and appallingly mean and pinched attitudes towards social and cultural spending.

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